Academic Degradation
Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics: Reconstructing Patristic
and Medieval Concepts
by Jame Schaefer
Georgetown University Press, 2009
(336 pages, $29.95, paperback)
reviewed by R. V. Young
The aim of Jame Schaefer’s new book is wholly admirable: She sets out to show that Christian theology of the patristic and medieval periods can provide a basis for ethical behavior in the face of a widely acknowledged abuse of the natural environment common among modern societies. To this end, she has compiled a good deal of information from contemporary scientific sources about ecology, biological evolution, and cosmology. In addition, she has explored the work of a substantial number of theologians and the lives of what might more properly be called devotional figures from the first 1,400–1,500 years of Christianity.
Apart from the good intentions and the amassing of data, however, it is difficult to find any other positive attributes of this book. The treatment of both theological concepts and scientific issues is at best banal and at worst misleading; the structure of the argument is mechanical and repetitious; and the style is likewise repetitious, verbose, and awkward. Getting all the way through the 300-plus pages of text and notes is a mind-numbing experience; rather than a treatment of environmental degradation, the book is a negative exemplum of academic degradation.
Theology for Dummies
In the first place, it is difficult to imagine for what conceivable audience this book is intended—except perhaps a tenure committee (Dr. Schaefer is identified on the back cover as an associate professor of systematic theology at Marquette). In one respect, the tone is hortatory, a plea to the faithful to regard careful, indeed loving, treatment of other species and their habitats as a religious obligation; and in some ways it looks like a volume designed for the unlearned for whom science and theology are both novelties.
There are, for instance, labored explanations of terms like ecosystem and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle on the one hand, and of hagiography and sacrament on the other. Introductions to St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Thomas Aquinas are provided, along with their birth and death dates—not just once, but repeatedly at the outset of successive chapters.
The discourse—here is a sample chosen randomly from among many like it—generally proceeds at this level:
In Contra Gentes, Athanasius (293–373) distinguished between God’s invisibility and the visible constituents of God’s creation, though he found them related symbolically. The visible creation points to the invisible Creator, he insisted from his faith perspective. Commenting on Romans 1:20, he taught that God intended humans to use their rational abilities to detect God’s invisible attributes from the things God created.
Nevertheless, a book comprising such theology-for-dummies observations is buttressed by a massive scholarly apparatus: the first chapter, for example, consists of slightly more than 15 pages of text followed by 128 notes taking up more than 10 pages. Chapter 6 runs to nearly 28 pages of text and adds 213 notes in another 15 pages. The bibliography takes up more than 25 pages.
The annoying, politically correct stylistic tics are also typical, and eventually—after endless pages of such clotted prose—altogether exasperating: In the quoted passage, “God” or “God’s” appears five times in three sentences because Dr. Schaefer never uses “he,” “him,” or “his” as pronominal substitutes for the name of the Deity, and “men” and “women” are always “humans.” Likewise, there is never mention of a “doctrine” or “dogma” or even of “faith”; patristic and medieval theologians always write from their “faith perspective.” Dr. Schaefer hopes that these “faith perspectives” will help alter the “behavior trajectories” of modern Christians.
R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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